Product description

Nansen's three-year expedition to the North Pole with the Fram marked the beginning of the modern age of exploration. This book is an account, by Freidtjof Nansen, of that expedition. It describes his plan, ridiculed by his peers, to allow the specially designed Fram to become frozen in the treacherous pack ice of the Arctic Oceans. Drifting with the current, he and his crew of twelve would be carried to the Pole. Unfazed by the discovery that the plan is a failure, he sets out with a fellow crew member to cover the remaining distance across the ice on foot. It was to take them a further harrowing fifteen months during which they shared a sleeping bag of rotting reindeer fur and were forced to feed the weaker sled dogs to the stronger ones. They were to travel 146 miles farther north than any Westerner had gone before, representing one of the greatest single gains in polar exploration in four centuries.

Editorial reviews

Nansen (1861-1930), the Norwegian polar explorer, scientist and diplomat, made the first crossing of Greenland from east to west in 1882 and set out in 1893 to try to prove the circulation of the Arctic current and also the permanent nature of the Arctic ice cover. He did this by deliberately wedging his shipFraminto the pack-ice off the North Siberian Islands to see whether it would drift westwards during the next three years (it did!) While the experiment was on, he and a few companions attempted to reach the Pole itself, struggling against ice flows, polar bears, scurvy, hunger and the endless polar night, and point reaching a new furthest north of 86i 14', 146 miles further than anyone else. This book is the account of that expedition, which made him theeminencegriseof polar explorers, admired and consulted subsequently by Scott, Shackleton and above all Amundsen, who became his protege (It was to him that Nansen lent his ship 'Fram' for his successful attempt on the South Pole in 1912). Later the first ambassador of independent Norway in London (1906-8), an avid supporter of the League of Nations and, in 1922, a Nobel Peace Prize Winner, he is still regarded as the most imaginative and innovative of polar explorers as well as a great humanitarian figure. (Kirkus UK)